Spiritual reflections, family, home educating typical and special needs children ~
Dedicated to: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Unborn.
"Rejoice in hope, persevere in tribulations, be constant in prayer." Romans 12:12
Certe bonum certanem! Fight the good fight!

St Gabriel Windows

Photocopy c. 2013 Jamie Laubacher

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Schooling Thoughts...

While we are still doing our classical curriculum (Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum), and using Mother of Divine Grace syllabi, we are looking forward to doing Five in A Row Volumes 3 and 4 this year as well. Last school year was very successful using FIAR as I detailed previously below from this 2009 post. I'm revisiting it now, reflecting and considering what wonders await my boys this new school year...now our 14th year of home education. As always, Christ before us, Christ to lead us...grant us the strength and courage to continue to raise our children in truly good Christian form. Many best wishes to you as you begin your new school as well.

As summer seems to evaporate, no pun intended...I begin preparing for our new school season. Our paperwork is completed per our state requirements and I'm beginning to look at the curriculum on the bookshelves for the grade levels I'll cover this year, with three children. Our oldest is looking over his book list for college! A whole different ball game there. But, this year, I'm excited to start my youngest son with Kindergarten and include Five in A Row. I love this program, and now that I consider my soon to be fifth grader more of a special needs student due to his OCD, I'm going to do FIAR for him also. I think both these young men age 6 and 10 will enjoy it, and enjoy doing some kind of school work together. We still follow Mother of Divine Grace, but for the youngest grades I love to have some kind of planned-out enrichment, particularly in the literature and listening areas. Modg does suggest and include in their program much literature. FIAR will nicely fill that category systemically for me.

This year I decided that instead of reserving the literature involved in the program through the library, which we have done in the past, I'm going to purchase the books for Volume 1 right off. This way, I'll always have that set of books that goes with that volume. One volume basically covers a semester. If all goes well this first semester, I'll go ahead and do Volume 2 to finish out the year. I'd love to get to Volume 4 eventually and make this a "special" curriculum for these two younger boys of mine through the next several years. Volume 4 is more of a Christian character building program which I'm excited about. I think they will greatly benefit from it, both for their own reasons at different levels of their development/ages.

Okay, more later on some of the great classic children's literature involved in the FIAR program.

In the meantime, Happy Schooling Thoughts to all my home schooling friends out there! Tell me what you're doing this year..